


The Mosquito and Dumpster Douche

by randomlyimagine



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Hawkeye (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, Clint still doesn't care, Gen, Natasha still kinda hates herself, Pre-Avengers (2012), Vampire AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-12 21:00:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16879098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomlyimagine/pseuds/randomlyimagine
Summary: “The Mosquito and Dumpster Douche, assassins, first class,” Clint declares. “How’s that as a line on your resume?”“Better than it is on yours.”Natasha Romanov used to literally drink the blood of her enemies. It matters, but less than she might think.





	The Mosquito and Dumpster Douche

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this probably three years ago in like a day, then stopped and never came back to it. Found it again, decided to cut it so it worked as a complete fic and clean it up, because there's never enough Natasha-centric fic (or weird AUs) in the world. Enjoy!!

Black. Trees casting shadows. The full moon, the night cast in stark relief.

Red. Red hair. Red blood. Red blood on a fang, peeking out between bright red lips.

\---

“So, you are the great Black Widow? The legendary assassin?” the man bellowed, throwing his arms out as he strode forward. “Well, I never would have guessed.”

His leer is as annoying as it is a mistake.

He assumes that, because she is handcuffed to the chair, hands and feet bound, gag across her mouth, that she is not dangerous. That she is contained.

He is _wrong_.

\---

Natasha was nine, the first time she disposed of an enemy from whom she was ordered— _allowed_ —to feed. Newly experimented on, newly turned, one of the first batch to be marked a success—pending the results of the inaugural missions. A beast that could not be brought to heel was of no use.

But Natasha would be of use. Her mission was complete. Her target wasn’t dead yet, but only because it was too hard to drink her fill if her victim’s heart had ceased beating.

His screams lasted until her fangs tore through his windpipe. Then he wheezed, and cried, until he didn’t.

Natasha let the body fall to the ground, then wiped the blood off her mouth and throat. Her shirt, she didn’t bother with—she would only succeed in smearing the splatter. She had been hasty in her enthusiasm.

A Black Widow was not supposed to be enthusiastic about anything but duty to the Motherland. But the blood had the best thing Natasha had ever tasted, or ever would.

Her kills would never be that messy again.

\---

Clint knows. Fury knows. Coulson knows that something is…different, about one of his agents. But that’s all he knows, because Natasha doesn’t tell anyone anything unless she absolutely needed to.

Clint found out when he saw _it_ in action. When he had tried, that first time, to kill her and bring her in. Fury couldn’t not have been told—especially after he’d let Clint bring her in instead of killing her.

But she did not earn the name Black Widow by revealing the aces hidden up her sleeves.

Coulson, for a long time, marked her occasional differences down to her past: the torture and the training and the brainwashing and the ripping soul out of self. Natasha knows he's now starting to wonder. The other agents have always called her _inhuman,_ when they thought she wasn’t around to hear _._  But Coulson has yet to figure out that they're right.

\---

What scant files had been recovered showed that the Red Room had performed extensive experimentation on its subjects, trying to increase endurance, increase reflexes, increase strength, increase efficiency, increase deadliness.

Very, very few SHIELD agents have the clearance necessary to know this.

A fact about SHIELD that surprises most people: the gossip mill almost religiously respects clearance levels. But it certainly rages among people who are in the know.

When Natasha first hears the rumor, overheard and related to her by Clint, that she received a bastardized form of the Super Solider Serum, one effective but not quite so good, she laughs for a whole minute straight.

\---

Here’s the thing about Natasha:

Everyone assumes that, when she says that she has red in her ledger, she means blood. And she does, of course. But not only in the way people think.

\---

Natasha does not, in actuality, use her _other_ abilities that often. It is a resentment that she knows deep down is impractical, makes her life harder, could even get her killed if she does not make the right call on restraint at the right moment. Yet, it is not a resentment she is willing to stop.

Not after…well, not after how she got them.

Therefore most of her feats are, in fact, humanly possible. She is simply that good, the deadliest fighter SHIELD has ever seen, even when actively suppressing her own nature.

When she gives _in_? That is, as Clint had once said, “a sight to be fucking seen.”

\---

“You shouldn’t be called the Black Widow, though,” Clint comments one night, six hours into a night long surveillance shift.

He glances up from the screens for a second and she pulls one side of the headset slightly farther askew. “You should be…hmm…”

Natasha waits for him to say something stupid.

“The Vampire Bat, if you want to keep with the animal theme.” Noticing her raised eyebrow, Clint continues, “Too obvious? Because I was going to go with The Mosquito, but I thought the other one sounded more badass…”

“Only if I get to give you a new codename.”

“Please, I’d be happy to be called Dumpster Dude.”

“More like Dumpster Douche,” Natasha mutters, because it’s Clint, and therefore she doesn’t need a good comeback.

“The Mosquito and Dumpster Douche, assassins, first class,” Clint declares. “How’s that as a line on your resume?”

“Better than it is on yours.”

\---

She makes Clint carry a wooden stake in his uniform pockets and tie a small bundle of blessed yew on a string around his neck.

“Come on, I don’t need this. I know we’re spies, we work in paranoia land, but I am not going to constantly arm myself with an eye on killing my partner!” Clint exclaims, the first time he sees them on his pile of gear, her on the other side of the room. But the thing is, Clint’s not surprised. He just wishes he was.

“Yes, you are.”

“Tasha, you’re one of two people in the world I trust to have my back, the only person besides Phil. What is so appalling to you about the idea that I trust you?”

Natasha stares at him for a long, long second, before she pushes off the row of lockers she was leaning against and takes a step closer. “There are other vampires in the world besides me.”

“Yeah, duh,” Clint scoffs, “but don’t try to tell me that this is about them.”

“It is,” she comments. And while Natasha only has tells when she wants to have tells, it occurs to Clint that maybe she’s not actually lying.

“Yeah, but that’s not all that it’s about.”

She closes her eyes and exhales forcefully, looking way too pissed for someone who just tried to insist that their partner maintain a readiness to kill them at all times. “It’s not like you don’t always carry around weapons that could take out any human agent in this base. Does that not make you break the same code, make you constantly preparing for their deaths?”

“That’s different and you know it. A gun, my arrows—there are tons of people I want to hit with those who aren’t my coworkers. Wooden stakes, though? Not so common a weapon.”

“I think you’ll find a stake through the heart will kill most things,” Natasha says, because she’s apparently incapable of not making things difficult.

Clint snorts. “You really want to play around right now?”

There is a long pause. When it breaks, Natasha does not break eye contact before speaking, but rather intensifies it. “This is about me trusting you. This is about me trusting you, as my partner, in a way I—cannot trust myself.”

“You really think you’re going to snap and kill me one day?”

“I think that in some lights, you look like my dinner.”

“Yeah, but you love me too much to kill me,” Clint says, shooting her best cheeky grin. His message: I trust you. I don’t hold this against you. I know you don’t want to kill me.

His message: stop this.

Natasha probably notices the message, but she ignores it.

 _“Come here,”_ Natasha commands, injecting power into her voice, suddenly resonant and irresistible.

Then it’s as if Clint’s limbs have been hijacked, he moves forward like a reflex, automatic, impulses controlling his limbs seeming to not even reach his brain.

He is carefully not freaking out as he watches his body walk forward until it comes to a stop roughly a foot in front of her.

 _“Sit down_.” She gestures at the bench and he manages to keep his expression completely blank as his legs fold under him, depositing him on the bench with more grace than he usually bothers with. He forces the chaotic mix of his emotions to stay off his face as he looks up at her, unable to leave, because he is a _fucking professional_ and also because Natasha is an idiot if she thinks making him walk across a room is all it’s going to take to lose his trust.

But then she leans down, leans in, says more quietly, only a few inches from his face: _“Bare your neck.”_

And he does. His arm comes up, pulls down the neck of his shirt, and his head tilts to the side.

Frankly now Clint’s waiting for her to stop, point made, but she leans in further, goes so far as to graze his neck with fangs that have appeared in her mouth, and for just a moment, as she inhales deeply, he wonders—

But he comes to his senses about the fact that this is Tasha right as she pulls away.

The thing is, Tasha would shoot him if she needed to, for the sake of an op, to save lives—but she would never betray him. Never kill him. He knows that.

Even if, maybe, she doesn’t.

After a second, she exhales deeply and sits on the bench next to him. “You weren’t afraid at all.”

He quirks an eyebrow at her, because the _duh_ is obvious enough that saying it would be overkill.

“Moron,” she bites out.

The effects of whatever she did apparently fade quickly, because Clint experimentally tries to tense his legs and finds he’s regained control of his body. So he puts his arm down and hopes she didn’t make him stretch out the collar of his shirt or something.

“It’s almost like you’ve given me five years of reasons to have faith in you, or something,” he says.

“Wear the goddamn yew, Clint. It’ll keep anyone from doing that to you ever again.”

“Really.”

“Against your skin, or it won't work. Keep it on you at all times.”

The thing is, Clint knows the value of a weapon. He carries around his own stakes sometimes—as Natasha well knows. He was never not going to take what was being offered.

He just needed her to stop being a fucking idiot first.

So he nods and puts the cord around his neck and slips the wood under his shirt, yew coming to rest against his chest.

“For the record, I still don’t think you’d ever actually try to kill me.”

Natasha barks out a quick laugh. She sounds a little bitter, but also, Clint thinks, perhaps a little wondrous.

“Yep, not getting rid of me that easily, no ma’am,” he says, and then throws his sweaty workout shorts at her face, just because he can.


End file.
